India’s lone uranium enrichment facility at Rattehalli, near Mysore, may become the target of the gravest act of cyberwar against India to date, attacking no less than its strategic nuclear programme, sources in the Indian hacker/cyberwarfare community have warned.

The sources said that computers at the Rattehalli facility, euphemistically called Rare Materials Plant (RMP), have likely been infected by the deadly Stuxnet, or a Stuxnet-derived malware, as a precursor to an attack to destroy thousands of centrifuges installed at the facility.

Such an attack was made on Iran’s Natanz enrichment plant last year, destroying over 1,000 centrifuges and setting its alleged nuclear bomb programme back by at least 12-18 months.

The RMP is critical for India’s nuclear submarine programme. Operating close to an estimated 10,000 centrifuges, RMP produces highly enriched uranium for the 90 MW reactor that will power India’s first N-submarine, Arihant, which is currently undergoing sea trials and is expected to be commissioned by 2016. Enriched uranium is also necessary for India’s boosted-fission and thermonuclear bomb programmes.

One source in the rarified cyberwarrior community alleged that a foreign intelligence agency inimical to India’s n-weapons programme, or rogue agents within such an agency, had managed to infect islanded computers — which run the plant’s operations and are not connected to the Internet or any other network — at RMP.

The discovery last week that the new Duqu malware, a trojan derived from the Stuxnet worm, had infected computers at a private Web hosting firm, Web Werks, in Mumbai, has lent new credence and urgency to the warning about the Rattehalli facility.

While attempts to elicit the views of officials in the Department of Atomic Energy went unanswered, an Indian government official charged with protecting critical infrastructure against cyber attacks said he did not 'rule out Stuxnet-like attacks on India'.